17 September 2014

In the following cut from
“The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (open the attachment or click on the
link below for a download containing a longer selection) it is clear that the
proletariat suffered a disaster when it had no allies and was isolated and
attacked by all the other classes together and massacred in June of 1848 in
Paris.

This is the situation that
the proletariat must always avoid. It is one reason why the working class must
always have allies. Here is part of Marx’s outline of the events:

“a. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes
against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days.

“b. June 25 to December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the
pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. Proclamation of a
state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December
10 by the election of Bonaparte as President.”

In the “18th Brumaire” the
contenders of the Great French Revolution reappear, namely the Aristocracy, the
Peasantry (nicknamed the “Montagne” –
“The Mountain”), the Bourgeoisie and the working Proletariat. Also described
are the serous contradictions within the bourgeois class; the apparently classless,
certainly manipulative Bonaparte, who played the four main classes off against
each other for more than two decades until he lost the plot; and the “lumpen proletariat” of idle adventurers
who were Bonaparte’s willing, and paid (with “whisky and sausages”)
accomplices.

Juggling the different class
interests and playing the different classes against each other is what is now
called “Bonapartism”. Louis Bonaparte did it for twenty years. Thabo Mbeki
managed for only ten. In both cases the main beneficiary turned out to be the
bourgeois class.

Here are four more of the
most well-known paragraphs taken from page 11 of our 16-page selection from the
“18th Brumaire” that reveal a lot of the class dynamics that Marx
describes in this classic work:

“Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem
to have made itself completely independent. The state machinery has so
strengthened itself vis-a-vis civil society that the Chief of the Society of
December 10 [Louis Bonaparte]
suffices for its head — an adventurer dropped in from abroad, raised on the
shoulders of a drunken soldiery which he bought with whisky and sausages and to
which he has to keep throwing more sausages. Hence the low-spirited despair,
the feeling of monstrous humiliation and degradation that oppresses the breast
of France and makes her gasp. She feels dishonored.

“And yet the state power is not suspended in the air.
Bonaparte represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society at
that, the small-holding peasants.

“Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big
landed property and the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the
dynasty of the peasants, that is, the French masses. The chosen of the
peasantry is not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament but
the Bonaparte who dismissed the bourgeois parliament. For three years the towns
had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the December 10 election and in
cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the Empire. The election of
December 10, 1848, has been consummated only by the coup d'etat of December 2,
1851.

“The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass
whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold
relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one
another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is
furthered by France's poor means of communication and the poverty of the
peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of
labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no
multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social
relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient,
directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of
life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society.

“A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside
it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of
these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department.

“Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by
the simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a
sack of potatoes.

“Insofar as millions of families live under conditions
of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their
culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to
the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local
interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their
interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization
among them, they do not constitute a class.

“They are therefore incapable of asserting their class
interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They
cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative
must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an
unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and
sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the
small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive
power which subordinates society to itself.”

In 2014, does the ANC “subordinate
society to itself”? Its opponents accuse it of such. Its supporters disagree.